Joel Santo DomingoHP Pavilion p6719c The HP Pavilion p6719c is a solid, basic home desktop PC that is easy to buy, easy to setup, but ultimately is outshined by less expensive PCs that have fewer drawbacks.

The HP Pavilion p6719c is a solid, basic home desktop PC that is easy to buy, easy to setup, but ultimately is outshined by less expensive PCs that have fewer drawbacks.

The HP Pavilion p6719c ($499.99 list, at Costco) is a solid, basic home desktop PC that is easy to buy, easy to setup, but it has a few drawbacks that keep it from scoring higher. With its speedy quad-core CPU and 4GB of memory, it will serve admirably as a primary system for a novice user, or a second or third PC for the house. However, there are other choices that outshine it, particularly our Editor's Choice for entry-level PCs.

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Design and Features
The p6719c has the standard HP Pavilion p6700 series chassis: glossy black front panel, black painted metal side panels. It's utilitarian and attractive at the same time. The system is a mini tower desktop, with some interior expansion space. The system is fairly easy to get into to upgrade using a screwdriver; once inside you'll find space for a two additional hard drives, one optical drive, two free memory DIMM slots, three PCIe x1 cards, and one PCIe x16 graphics card. The p6719c only has a 250W power supply, so it won't support a high-end graphics card, but it will certainly support a couple of internal hard drives as well as minor upgrades like a TV tuner card or USB 3.0 card. The exterior has six USB 2.0 ports, audio ports, DVI, and VGA. Notably absent are USB 3.0 and HDMI, but then again basic PC users are unlikely to care about these future-proofing technologies. You can always add USB 3.0 via a PCIe card.Still, it would be nice to have HDMI to hook up the desktop up to a large external display like an HDTV.

The desktop comes with a 1TB 7,200rpm SATA hard drive, which is plenty for the home user. That's enough to hold more than half a million JPEGs or MP3s, or almost 250 DVD-quality movies. The p6719c also comes with 4GB of system memory, which is more than enough for a home user. It used to be that 4GB was rare for $5,000 gaming PCs, but now 4GB is becoming standard for even budget PCs. The p6719c comes with a built-in 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi adapter, so you can hook up to your home's wireless network. While Wi-Fi is expected as a standard feature on laptops and smartphones, Wi-Fi is still rare on budget desktop PCs. Though the system lacks HDMI, you can use the existing DVI and VGA ports to drive two monitors at the same time, a function still not common on budget PCs.

The p6719c has a couple of annoying features. Along with the lack of HDMI (which the system's integrated ATI Radeon HD 4200 was designed to support), the system has a plethora of bloatware pre-installed. There are multiple entries for eBay, Skype, and Snapfish. Other programs mucking things up are HP Games, links to Quicken/Quickbooks, Hulu Desktop, HP Music, Netflix, and five eBook readers (Blio, Barnes&Noble, Kobo, PressReader, and Zinio). While many of these programs are useful if you have subscriptions to each individual service, the fact that such a large number of extra programs are foisted on you without your permission is almost unpleasant. It's like buying a washing machine, but then finding that the drum, door, owner's manual, and detergent dispenser all have stickers on them encouraging you to buy a supplemental stain remover. HP has a link in the taskbar to its own HP Download Store. I wish that that was the only piece of software pre-installed, as that would counteract the clutter while giving the user access to all of these downloadable products. The desktop also comes with a 6-month subscription to the pre-installed Norton Internet Security suite. That's not bad, but one year to 15 months would be a much more useful subscription length. One notable plus is the system's two-year warranty, which is standard for Costco retail systems. This is a lot better than rivals that only have one year's warranty, including the system's almost doppelganger, the HP Pavilion p6720f ($599.99 list, 3 stars) (stay tuned for our review).

Performance
Thanks to its AMD Phenom II quad-core processor memory, the p6719c is a good performer on most of our benchmark tests, especially when compared with other budget desktops. The p6719c completed the Handbrake video encode test in a quick 2 minutes 30 seconds, and the Photoshop CS5 test in 5:13. The Editors' Choice for entry-level desktops, the Dell Inspiron i580-8139NBC ($499.98 list, 4.0 stars), was only a little bit ahead at the Handbrake test in 2:23 and the CS5 test in a speedy 4:15. Both are miles quicker than the nettop EC, the Lenovo IdeaCentre Q150 ($399 direct, 4 stars) (12:31 Handbrake, 23:38 CS5). All this shows that the p6719c is a very good multimedia performer, though not the fastest. Like other entry-level desktop PCs with integrated graphics, the p6719c is pretty bad at the 3D game tests: single-digit scores on the Crysis test, and it couldn't run the Lost Planet 2 test. It goes without saying that this isn't a desktop for hardcore 3D game playing.

Compared with the Dell Inspiron i580-8139NBC, the p6719c is good, but not great. The Dell is a better performer at multimedia tasks, and comes with a lot less bloatware. About the only place where the p6719c trumps the Dell i580-8139NBC is at hard drive space, but that's a very minor advantage, since adding a hard drive is one of the easiest upgrades to do, even for a novice user. The Dell Inspiron i580-8139NBC's Core i3-550 processor is likely to feel faster for longer than the components in the p6719c as well. The HP Pavilion p6719c is a solid, basic home PC, but its lower performance and boatload of bloatware keep it from supplanting the leader of the pack.

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Joel Santo Domingo is the Lead Analyst for the Desktops team at PC Magazine Labs. He joined PC Magazine in 2000, after 7 years of IT work for companies large and small. His background includes managing mobile, desktop and network infrastructure on both the Macintosh and Windows platforms. Joel is proof that you can escape the retail grind: he wore a yellow polo shirt early in his tech career. Along the way Joel earned a BA in English Literature and an MBA in Information Technology...
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